Just as the German media has destroyed its credibility with lies, the US government is consistently destroying Washington's credibility both with its own citizens and the rest of the world.

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Russia and China, the other two significant nuclear powers, no longer believe anything Washington says or any agreement that the US government signs. The Russian and Chinese governments have observed that Washington does not obey its own statutory law, much less international law and treaties that Washington has signed. Russian President Vladimir Putin has criticized Washington for acting as if its will was the only law.

Europeans know that they and their governments are Washington's vassals and that Europeans are impotent to do anything about it.

Some percentage of the 99 percent understand that Washington is aligned with the one percent against them and that their incomes and economic prospects will continue to decline.

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Economists, or rather the few who haven't sold their souls, know that the government's economic data are pulled out of a magician's hat and massaged to produce numbers contradicted by reality. Unemployment is measured according to methodologies designed to prevent its discovery. Inflation is measured according to methodologies designed to deny its existence. Jobs are reported that don't exist, and GDP growth rates are announced that declines in real median family incomes and consumer credit make impossible.The poverty level income is set artificially low in order to minimize welfare spending.

The lies that Washington and the powerful private interest groups that control the US government tell us go unchallenged by the print and TV media and by NPR. The propaganda that Americans are fed is more extreme than the propaganda of Big Brother in George Orwell's 1984.

In last Friday's report the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) tells us that the unemployment rate has declined to 5.8% and that 214,000 new jobs were created in October. Once again let me explain these lies to you. The unemployment rate is low because the one that the government and financial media emphasize does not count those millions of Americans who have become so discouraged from looking for jobs that do not exist, that they have quit looking. If you give up and stop searching for a job, the US government does not count you as a member of the work force. You are unemployed but not counted as unemployed.

The uncounted unemployed can be measured in the sharp 21st century decline in the labor force participation rate. The labor force participation rate has declined because there are no jobs to participate in. But Washington, the financial media, and the bought and paid for economists lie. They say the participation rate is down because the baby boomers are retiring. However, as John Titus, Dave Kranzler, and I documented with the government's own data in a recent column, the participation rate of baby boomers is the highest of all and the only one that is rising.

The reason is that with the Federal Reserve's sole concern with the welfare of a small handful of mega-banks -- the ones that sit on the board of the New York Federal Reserve Bank -- real interest rates are negative. Therefore, retirees have no income from their retirement savings. (Generally speaking, retirees avoid stock investments, because they can lose a great deal from a major correction, and it can take more years than they have left for stocks to recover.)

To supplement their Social Security pensions (a rigged CPI prevents or minimizes cost-of-living increases), retirees take the temporary, lowly paid jobs that are all that the US economy can produce. These jobs do not provide sufficient income with which to form a household.

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As I have pointed out for a decade, or longer, the US economy no longer creates First World jobs. The US economy creates jobs for waitresses and bartenders, hospital orderlies, and retail clerks. The fact that the complexion of the US work force is becoming Third World is not considered a notable problem by the media or financial press, and economists seem immune to the facts.

Dr. Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury for Economic Policy in the Reagan Administration. He was associate editor and columnist with the Wall Street Journal, columnist for Business Week and the Scripps Howard News Service. He is a contributing editor to Gerald Celente's Trends Journal. He has had numerous university appointments. His books, The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West is available (more...)